Podcast Episode - Child Welfare in the time of COVID
Maureen Leif, President
Grays Peak Strategies
On this podcast I am able to talk to one of my most favorite speakers, Ron Haskins, to discuss the impact that the current COVID crisis has had on Child Welfare.
Ron Haskins is a Senior Fellow and Co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the Cabot Family Chair in Economic Studies.
Together with Morgan Welch, a project coordinator on Children and Families also at the Brookings Institution – published an article about the impact this crisis is having on our Child Welfare system. “What COVID-19 means for America’s Child Welfare System” which was very applicable to the child welfare work that we are currently doing in Colorado. Currently, Grays Peak Strategies is working on helping manage the Circle of Parents Expansion (COPE) Grant for the Colorado Judicial Branch. The premise of the grant is to expand peer support groups for parents going through substance abuse recovery involved in the child welfare program. When COVID-19 hit, the collaborative partners in the grant including Colorado Department of Human Services, Illuminate Colorado (runs the Circle of Parents Peer Support groups), Colorado Judicial Branch and others were scrambling on how to provide creative services to parents in order to help them maintain their sobriety throughout COVID. During recovery parents are told to socialize and maintain contact with support systems and with COVID-19, parents were told the opposite. This is really just the tip of the iceberg on issues that our families involved in the child welfare system were facing.
COVID-19 brought so many issues to the surface and Ron and Morgan digest all of the complicated issues around our child welfare system being reactionary and the issues with mandatory reporters not having the same access to children as they normally would. We had been hearing of reduced numbers of child abuse reports in Colorado, and Ron indicates that it is as high as 70% in some states.
From the very first time I saw Ron Haskins speak at a conference, I was fascinated. He’s always so passionate about human services, how we fund programs and the policies behind the numbers. Even if you haven’t always agreed with him, he does make you think about our assumptions, policy and funding. This was a great dive into COVID-19 and the impacts on child welfare. Ron is looking to retire in the not so distant future, so I felt lucky to have him on our podcast. If I know Ron, I don’t think it’ll be sitting still for too long though, his heart in in this field and there is work left to be done.
This episode is available now. You can find the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Breaker, Anchor and more.